


As from a Stream in Winter

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 19:02:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2743670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor, the Master, and the loaded gun: all their lives, they've constructed truth against death and memory in spite of doubt. This was the first time, and this will be the last time, that they face it together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As from a Stream in Winter

_Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember._

_Joan Didion_ , Blue Nights

~

_“Old friend, is she? If you’ve ever let this creature live, everything that has happened today is on you. All of it, on you. And you're not going to let her live again.”_

If he’s ever let the Master live. As if he has ever been able to do anything but watch his old friend die, deliver his friend to that death, _help save his friend_ from death specifically so that death could lay a claim again. They have practiced their dance well, this age-old triumvirate, Doctor, Master, Death.

~

They were just students then, a couple of youths in initiates' creamy robes, dashing down the curved, ivory corridors of the Prydonian Academy, running amok in classes and questioning their teachers because they knew they could, because they were cleverer than their teachers, because they were cleverer than anybody who had ever come to the Academies before. At night they lay awake in bed and dreamt of freedom, of lives spent learning the currents and curves of time and space, dreamt of flying, knew it was their destiny. During the day, they played truant as often as attended to their studies, sneaking away as dawn bled across the umber sky, the grey flagstones outside their window chilly against bare feet.

They would begin to sprint--it seemed they were always running in those wilder days--as soon as they reached the wide steppe of short, vermilion grass. It flowed in the valley between the mountains as though it were a living glacier, following a path carved long before the days of Rassilon by ice of whose only sign was now a somnolent little river, shallow and slender, like a serpent. They ran, one following the other, until they were done running, until they fell to the riverbank, laughing, until they could imagine the stars had attenuated and they had passed them by, hyperlight, and that they had left the Academy and their Houses with their lonely barns and the planet and the transduction barrier far, far behind.

It was better out there, away from expectations and responsibilities and the long writing of history, past and future (for in life there was no present), away from the adults who feared them or wanted things of them and the other students, who hated and loved them equally, who did not share their dreams. Out there, they told the stories that spun their selves, wrote truth into their timelines by believing in it, danced promises together like the weight of joy on beating hearts.

Happy alone, they would sit in the grass as the second sun ignited the forest, setting that silver ocean aflame with a fire so bright it scorched the soul, seared itself into the memory forever. The boys, silent, watched until they could not bear to watch any longer, their breath caught in their throats. Neither ever admitted it to his companion in the long hours after, weaving elaborate tales of the lives they would lead when they were unbound from the Shining World, when they could roam, but each was, in that infinite moment, privately afraid that he would miss his home, mourn for those very days high in the stern mountains and among the burning trees.

Theta Sigma almost always had a fruit in his pocket, magicked away at dinnertime, and the two of them could last all day on that small meal, content in one another's presence. It was far too cold, in arid summer or snowy winter, to swim in the remanent stream, whose waters had so recently been ice atop the nearby summits, but they would dangle their feet in it, soaking the edges of their long robes. Later, it would seem an impossible naïveté, but never, in a thousand afternoons, did Koschei imagine what it might be like to fall into those depths, to feel the moment's chill envelop and enter him, to stare up through the clear, clear water at the unreachable sky. Like all children and all Time Lords, he believed he would live forever, somehow, and that the flow of the river, the foam constantly carried away towards a distant and barbarian lake, had nothing to do with him.

But death had other plans for the boys, death embodied in the form of a third child. His name was Torvic, and it could be said that, like all the other students, all other privileged Gallifreyans who would become the Lords of Time, his greatest flaw was a lack of imagination ( _he_ could not have talked his way out of death). In truth it could have been any one of their peers, and it was Torvic's misfortune to have been just creative enough, to be the first not to be saved, to have had enough of the bully in him to sneak after the best friends, to follow them through the morning into their private idyll, to begrudge Koschei and Theta their stolen happiness.

Torvic came upon them at last beneath a favourite tree on the bank of the river, Koschei dozing in the shifting, filigreed sunslight, Theta staring up at the filter of the leaves. His voice filled the spaces between birdsong and water and metallic susurrus, a long murmuring ramble on the nature of trees, on how forests might be different on alien worlds, and yet still, somehow, forests, as on Gallifrey. On what it meant to be a forest, a tree, a self. Koschei listened with half his mind, as was his habit, weaving the discourse like a thread of gold into the weft of meandering dreams, Theta Sigma's speculations so familiar as to be indiscernible from his own thought, from the sound of his own breath.

And then he realised with a start that a harsher breathing disturbed their peace, and as he sat upright, tensing, he heard laughter, beginning low and growing sharper as he looked about wildly, trying to localise its origin. Until, finally, Torvic stepped around the tree, a stout branch in his hands. His teeth were like skeleton teeth turned ghoulish in his gaping mouth, and he slapped the branch against his palm in ominous display. They scrambled to their feet, made awkward by alarm, Theta suddenly quiet, watchful.

"You're not in class," Torvic accused, spitting consonants. "You should be in class. Why aren't you in class?"

Koschei hated the sense of paralysis that came over him then, loathed the feeling that he could only watch as Torvic closed the distance towards him and his friend, certain that he would remember the rhythm of the branch's inexorable percussion as long as he lived. He despised that he closed his eyes in dread when Theta opened his mouth, saying, sounding, if anything, _irritated_ , "You're not in class either, Torvic."

"I had to make that sacrifice, to follow you, to make sure you weren't in any _trouble_."

"Well, we're not."

"Oh, but I think you are." Koschei opened his eyes to see that Torvic was so close now he could tap on Theta's chest with the branch; ash-like bark flaked away and dusted the skirt of Theta's robes.

A frisson of dread--strangely, _for_ Torvic, not of--came over Koschei that seemed, impossibly, to cause a change in Theta Sigma, as though one boy's foreboding informed the other, as fear passes between trees on the shiver of leaves and the diffusion of particles through the air. His friend's voice went low, as if he were speaking dangerous secrets to a confidante. "I think you should go now," he said.

Torvic's face twisted in amusement, and while Koschei was convinced in that moment that he would come to regret it, fatally, the larger boy clearly felt only disbelief. He knocked Theta away, and as his victim stumbled on a slick root, swung his makeshift weapon, winding back for a brutal blow, aimed with deliberation at Theta's head. As the boys watched, transfixed, the precocious premonition that had so insistently gripped them both disintegrated, and Koschei saw, mirrored in Theta's wide eyes, the terror of someone who was helpless, trapped.

It was this fear that propelled him, through it that he acted. The mad ruthlessness that he kept bottled spilled into him, and he reached out to intercept the club, against its malevolent momentum a slight boy with the speed of a desperate animal and the precision of a machine.

Impossibly, the branch snapped, the freed half flying off into the trees with a hollow clang. Before Torvic could react, he stepped in to wrest the remaining half from his grasp, brandished the jagged end at him like a sword. Torvic _sneered_ , confident, taller than either of them by at least a head and outweighing them by even more, and the nerve slipped away, slithered out the pit of his stomach.

Torvic grabbed his wrist, squeezed and crushed so that his hand spasmed painfully and he was forced to drop his makeshift defense. Then Torvic twisted him torward the river, using his arm wrenched behind him like a relentless lever. They reeled forward, as though in a tyrant dance. He had just enough focus to see his friend’s face as they turned, and he clung to the image, because it was his only lifeline, because in that moment he knew what was coming: there was punishing commitment in Torvic’s grip, and he wasn’t strong enough to resist the compulsion of that force. And then they lurched the few steps across the slippery bank of the river, and he fell inexorably into the water.

The release of his arm was a relief, the water’s chill a shock that wouldn’t register. The shove, the weight that had pressed him forward didn’t let up, but now pushed his head down, down; he fought to surface, and cruel hands kept him under; he kicked against the cutting fronds that pulled at him, tangling around his ankles, and the hands drove him into their razor edges. The pressure and the panic grew and grew, and in his fear he couldn’t control his body, couldn’t resist the imperative that said to breathe, and if he couldn’t the bypasses wouldn’t kick in--

He gasped, inhaling, and choked on the icy water. It _hurt_...

The water was reddening, and his vision filled with dark forms. The stream churned.

Then someone was dragging on his arms, and the depths were letting him go; there was the surface, and there the bank, the grass, the trees, the sky.

And a figure, the someone who had pulled him out: Death, it was Death. Gigantic and full of rage and triumph, fierce as sunslight swallowed and reëmitted, like gamma rays bursting endlessly. A woman. He retched up all that water, his whole body spasming; his eyes stung, his chest stung, his hearts stung. He tried to see Death more clearly and comprehend why she had dragged him out of the river. And no, no; it was not a woman, but a boy. Death was sobbing, scrawny and terrified, shuddering over him hysterically. There was a big rock in his hand.

Sharp in one corner. Blood and bone on it.

Koschei began to shiver with cold and with shock. He forced himself to look away from Theta and into the water. He stared into it for a long time while his body recovered its breath. Finally, he looked back to his friend.

“We have to get him out of the river,” he said. His voice felt ragged, like someone had been strangling, not drowning him. The words skimmed over his throat and refused to catch and sound. He tried again. “We have to get rid of the body.”

Theta Sigma stared back with a sort of helpless horror. Koschei forced himself to his hands and knees and crawled to the disturbed edge of the stream, plunging his arms back into the killing thing before allowing any hesitation to creep in. But it was no use. He didn’t have the leverage alone.

“Help me with this. Theta.” He craned his neck to try to make some kind of contact with Sigma’s eyes, to make him focus. His hands were already numb around Torvic’s sleeves. “ _Theta Sigma_. I can’t do this on my own!”

Even for two boys working together, it was a struggle to reclaim Torvic’s boatlike body from the river, and by the time they had buried what they couldn’t burn in an afternoon, improvising poor shovels out of the broken branch, they felt empty past refilling, drained, like they were the dead. The light had gone from the day, their robes were filthy sodden saturated indistinguishably with water and blood and mud, and Koschei just wanted to be _warm_ again. To retreat to dreams.

Home, and their beds, seemed so far now, and they made it back of course, but the actual finiteness of the long hike didn’t shorten the impossible distance of it. They stole in along the same, grey stone, through the same, unchanged window, where Ushas caught them but their teachers did not, and they didn’t care that she had covered for them and wanted to know where they had been, and, miraculously, she let them get away with it, and they went to bed.

Koschei’s sleep was at once deep and troubled, disturbed and trapped by timelines that wouldn’t stop closing like walls, like a maze that was all dead ends. Running meant running into, _slamming_ into these curtailed futures; the harder he ran, the faster he smashed against them, shattering over and over and over and over and over and over and never hurt him over and over and over and over and over and over and

“--no, I can’t! That’s too hard, don’t make me. It isn’t _fair_.”

Somewhere nearby, Theta’s voice was a pitched rush, talking into the dark.

A pause. “I don’t want to--! Take...” Another. “But he--”

There was a long moment in which it seemed to Koschei three held breaths, there in the room of his childhood, three waited, balanced at the apogee of an unseen choreography. But there was nobody else there, just him, his dearest friend, and the spectre of an act they couldn’t understand.

Then, time itself appeared to exhale and the dancers collapsed towards one another: waves breaking, particles accelerating.

A crash as of rapids on rocks.

Water churned, reddening, filled and filling with dark forms.

Koschei felt it close over him, like he was drowning, and hands were keeping him under. Suffocating, for the first time in their lives he couldn’t reach for Theta, and so the distance in that little room grew, widened. The long night felt like a cage, all the more lonely for the sound of each other’s breaths across this newly-carved canyon.

In the morning, his friend couldn’t look at him. As the days followed, they attended their classes, and studied their texts, and recited their lessons, and eventually they came clean to Ushas, because they needed to tell someone, and she was a little more level-headed, and a little wiser, and a little more able to go out to the place where the forest met the stream and report that she could see nothing more than bent reeds and scraped soil, smell only dirt and snow, not smoke or ash.

And though she was an objectivist, though she thought it mattered exactly how it happened, they couldn’t tell her everything; they never sifted the details, sorted it into causes and effects and winnowing possibility fractals as they had been taught to do, never managed to split one boy’s intentions from the other’s actions, one boy’s actions from the other’s reactions. It wasn’t something they’d ever been good at, any better than they could differentiate one individual from the other in the twinned intertwined trunk of that favourite, now-forsaken tree, weeping heavy with guilt into the river.

It was part reticence and part confusion, it was pronouns that got mixed up because the timelines were so closely slaved in obligate co-temporality, I and he; it was the presentiment that gripped them now writing itself into their memory through the non-present presumptive pluprogressive, the already-I-am-not-now-must-be of destiny, future memory of a tangled repetition, reënactment, reiteration: a crime that like a virus already had integrated itself lysogenically into the genome of their souls’ stories, and a theme like a crime that must be examined with forensic obsession from now on, constructed over and over out of the unreliable witness of their own narrative. What had happened now will have happened again and again.

The only question was who. And its encoded symbiote, to whom. As they tried to give Ushas an accurate account, what they found was that memory was a feat of imagination, and what they knew was that in the future they remembered, murder is made a practice, an attempt to make sense of what was so absolute as to have no sense to beings of possibility.

One killed. One will kill. Memory and precognition bled into one another as into cold water. Death made herself a companion on all the branches of possible time, rooted in this insidious node now calcified. The choices remaining were illusions, and all bad ones: him or me, and when?

In the telling, they were changed. In the recitation, suddenly they were old men looking back on youth. In the betrayal, they found it impossible to construct a better meaning. Ushas averted her gaze out of respect or pity, and Thete’s eyes remained elusive, uneasy, distancing, and Koschei realised that _he_ had never escaped death in the river at all.

He stopped trying to talk to Theta--he stopped talking to anybody, except they never knew it because he still spoke to them, and the only one who never spoke back was Theta. Students wondered how they had fallen out. Teachers mumbled approvingly of forgoing the distractions of friendship, as though their charges had finally put down childish toys. People thought they had become enemies.

But time, for them, remained so intertwined as to be strangling. Not speaking, not consenting to look only tightened the constriction binding them together.

So each told the half-known story only to himself, attempting to talk his way out of confused, tangled, unwanted destiny. Out of what immutably _had been done_. In this isolation, Koschei convinced himself if he never shared a dream so deeply again--if he never let anyone else into his confidence, if he never flew on bare feet across grass at dawn--he might be safe from any further such contamination of his soul.

They searched for Torvic, but no one ever found him. No one thought to look outside, in the woods. He became an absence, a hollow in the Matrix. A lie.

In time, they were friends again, when each had resumed the painstaking, solitary task of rebuilding his ruptured self, pulling their threads apart in hopes of disentangling them. In time, they even spun new plans or reiterated the old ones, but they never again ran alone together in the wild valley, and neither boy ever mentioned the day his friend almost died, or of what he had had to do to save him. And if at night Koschei drowned and died and died again, if he remembered the weight of rock in his hand and felt the abrasion of cadonstone on his palm, if he felt bone give and collapse with a sickening, satisfying crunch at the impact of that stone in his hand, he didn’t describe the memory to his friend. He allowed the memory to evolve in isolation, its enormities unconfirmed, its dread a bloated, disintegrating demon.

He couldn’t forget what he had seen on Theta’s face, the flashes of emotion he had accidentally memorised: horror, fear, terror. Of him.

Of how he had held Torvic under the reddening water. How he had made Theta help him drag the body out of the river and into the sharp and silver trees. How they had burned what they could in an afternoon and buried the rest, their robes heavy with water and soil and blood. How Theta had sobbed.

When Koschei looked at Theta Sigma, he saw these memories, and he saw how Theta had looked when Theta wouldn’t look at him, and his hearts crowded in his chest like he was drowning.

So he began to tell himself it didn’t matter. He began to tell himself he was someone who didn’t feel, when in fact he felt more than he ever had before, mostly pain and disappointment and alienation but also tenderness and regret and an inextinguishable, undeserving, exasperated love. It was a self-deception that fitted well with the lie and the hypocrisy their friendship gradually became.

In time other things took place between them, memories piled up like a great midden of broken crockery. Somewhere underneath, the thing that had happened by the river became both mythical and apocryphal. The suppressed recitation of what had taken place became more real than fact.

This is how Time Lords do relativity. Within the song they must sing themselves to keep on existing, it’s a dissonance, this motif, a suspension of proof that transposes unresolved from movement to movement, moment to moment, transmitted cell to cell. It cannot be borne repeating and has will be committed until truth is written and rewritten, markings on the page so heavy with crossings-out and copyings-over that you can feel them in welts and tears from the other side. In the very tangible thing that is Time Lord future, Time Lord past does not yet exist, and what you tell yourself when you are born becomes what you are.

Koschei told himself he was resilient. He told himself that he was clever (this, at least, did not require the suspension of disbelief), and that he would always survive, by wit and by will. He told himself he controlled his own fate. Told himself the cold was not his destiny.

He told himself it did not _hurt_. He willed himself to believe it.

He missed his friend, the way they had been before. The hand to hold in the dark and the promise projected in time and the story to make sense of together.

He inured himself to pain, painstakingly rewrote that line whenever it was necessary.

And years went by.

They passed each other in the curved corridor on the very last day they would be together, responsibilities and alleigances keeping them apart, each busy in his own preparations, but to Koschei the physical evasion of _not stopping_ , not meeting and touching and sharing hit him as hard as the Doctor’s younger self had, on the very first day, barrelling unseeing into another initiate as he fled from the Untempered Schism.

Then, he had been an unknown boy from another House, yet in that collision even the short, the very short time they had spent not yet in one another’s lives had been obliterated, the contact between them reverberating back and back and forwards forever. Now, his friend had chosen a new name, and seemed unknowably remote, and Koschei wanted only to reach for him, close the distance that had stretched him so thin as to leave tears in his soul.

“Doctor…” The word was strange on his tongue, and felt like it had been chosen to fill his mouth with mud, or ice.

He stopped and made his people wait for him, and he went after his friend, because they had run out of time, because they had never talked. Because of memory. Because he loved his friend more than anything he could name, and they had been meant to dream together, to run together, free in time and space and flight and destiny, one day, and one day had come and they were not running together.

“Thete, _please_?” he said to the Doctor’s back. His voice skimmed over his throat, breaking on the words.

The Doctor didn’t look at him, and Koschei couldn’t see his face.

It felt like a death. It felt like death.

~

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_Because love, it's not an emotion. Love is a promise._

_And he will never hurt her._

~

~

~

And now the Doctor has been told not to save her; now he’s been told not to let her live. Now the ground is dust, not mud, and dry; and the water has burned away, and the dead have not been drowned. Now the future that she has practiced is a memory of death, and an infection that’s been burned (a gene that’s been excised); a crime that won’t be repeated. It’s a murder now that won’t be allowed to have happened again and again.

He turns reluctantly to look at his old friend, and he’s trapped in this choice--he can’t let her live and he can’t kill her and he can’t let Clara kill her, not out of revenge, which even if her other reasons are sound he can see right there written on her overly-expressive face would be how this will stick in her soul later on when it’s far, far too late to save her; he knows all about that.

So he’s stood in a graveyard, improbably, about to aim a live weapon at the one person he has always tried to save, the first. She’s no help, framing herself like a picture, for him, between the thin old stones, grey as the ledge beneath a window. If she is to be believed, he is making their decisions now. He has to think for both of them, for all of them. But does he know what’s right any longer? If he gives up on either of his friends, what kind of Doctor does that make him?

All around them, the graves are hollow. They’re not surrounded by the dead, they are the dead. The three of them are the only ones left, and the living don’t inhabit a graveyard. But Time Lords don’t die like humans die (this is a lie but one that has been made, through ingenuity, into truth), so the imagery is all borrowed, and only believable if you don’t look at it too closely, like so much of his life.

Up until this point, he has been grateful for the loan.

Human morality seems to be failing him, though, in the face of the dilemma he, who has always before cheated this question the way his human counterparts might cheat death (at the last minute, and incredulously at first, then with a sense that he must have had a _reason_ to escape), for all his wily cunning cannot solve.

Anything that he does today will be a betrayal. Love is a promise, as he has just remembered. His name is that promise, canonised into the text of his life on the day he chose it. But what do you do when you make your promise to more than one person, and you can’t keep it for both of them?

He’s eight years old, holding hands with another lost little boy across the space between two dormitory cots.

He’s hiding, a terrified lonely thing in a barn (this barn he doesn’t yet know draws them all with its invisible temporal gravity), a long way from where he’s meant to be, and that boy comes and finds him, sits with him and says nothing and lets him cry and keeps him warm, and when he’s ready, walks him back to school, where they face the consequences of their absence together.

He’s wet and cold on a muddy bank, and there are scorched bones beneath the ground. One boy has died, and two boys have lived (and one has killed). This is the first tally on the body count, and when they have decided between them what happened outside the Academy, it is so unthinkable that they never speak of it again.

But he has to understand, and he replays it in his memory, tells himself the details so he can make sense of his part in them. Recites the water and draws the sensation of falling, an endless suspended sensation like he lost his balance long ago and is still waiting for the cold shock when he breaks the surface. He reviews the death dance and the hand grabbing a wrist and an ankle and a rock and the universe balancing with its breath held, waiting for someone to inhale and shift the pattern of particles inscribed in the air. Always, the thing in the night, waiting. Always, the thing outside, inhumed and muttering in the wild.

What he concludes is this; that for the rest of his life, he refuse death, reject its reiterative call, that sentence written already-was-then-must-be.

For a long time, his only regret is that his best friend can’t seem to follow. It pulls at him, stretches him thin, because the ply of his being can’t be unwound from the thread of their timelines spun together, the twist of I and we, future and past. It feels like a failure, and he feels, also for the first time, the drowning weight of guilt, as the closest companion of his hearts turns distant and secretive and hard. So when the time comes, he makes a vow, writes it into the code of his very being. Death will not win. Death will not steal his friend, his soul. The Doctor will heal him.

And yet. A lifetime’s spans tread on the ruins of intention. All the times since that death had come for the Master, whether as avatar or offering, when has the Doctor ever saved him?

The Master’s previous voice echoes in his mind. _Always the women_. The Doctor remembers the weight of that form in his arms, surprisingly small, and then smaller still dying rather than regenerate (to spite him, to leave him). All alone, he had cried until he couldn’t make any more sounds or shed any more tears, his throat raspy like someone had been trying to strangle him. He had shut out those women (one stopped and the other he couldn’t save, neither without fault and both free of blame), ignored his friends, gathered the cold body and left the Valiant, gotten himself lost in some damp and rustling, alien place, tore down a tree and built a pyre and burnt his best enemy, too late to save him.

Death had won after all (death was always winning, though life kept finding a way). The Doctor had not saved the Master’s life, though not for want of trying.

And then--later, stranger; the Master had saved _his_.

All that running, all that evasion, thinking it was the Master who would finally ally with death and admit their association, accept her dominion and come for him, repeat one last time the thing they cannot face; and in the end they’d eluded her once more.

The Doctor, facing the knowledge he’d have to kill the Master to save humanity and restore the time lock that kept Gallifrey’s insanities safely hidden, had gotten out of it as he always did. He had looked his friend in the eyes--and they were wet, the Master never cried--and stared down his fear and his bereavement and the sense that he was about to shoot an animal who suddenly understood why this had to happen and still the spirit cried out it could not happen; and he had found another way. Got away with it again.

And _get out of the way_ was him saving his best friend, on a riverbank or before a god, and it was his best friend saving him, refusing to let death have him, though it took the emptying of all his life’s force to send their demon back to hell. They’ve drowned for each other. They’ve given up the dream of flying. They’ve breathed water and mud and ice and ash. They’ve fallen. They’ve breathed cold water and exhaled silver plasma.

But not this time.

_Always the women._

The Mistress is only one of three who need to be saved, and the Doctor has a chance to save one. _Just one bullet_. One that made it past him. One he wouldn’t fire. And now one last bullet, in the form of a human girl’s grieving directive, and a necessity like love, and an embodiment of the fear unspoken that came to him once in the night.

He hides his face in his hand, covers his mouth and his eyes, because he is afraid of the things that will come out of him, and the things that will show, if he doesn’t, and because just for a moment he’s wishing it all away, like a child. He feels small and worn and defeated. Uncountable--unaccountable, uncounted--years wash around him like water, dense, cold. He doesn’t want to look at her. Doesn’t want to face what he has done, has failed to do, is going to do.

She’s incredulous, accepting, sad, uncertain; strangely calm. She has always looked this vulnerable to him, underneath the strict control (and the mania; for her, control gone inflammatory), but there’s a gentleness to her now, like someone who has reconciled with suffering after suffocating repetition.

They’re not children anymore. At no time does this feel more true than when his childhood friend is with him, reminding him of who he had been before he became who he is. He’s defined his life by what he isn’t, made his promises on what he won’t do, and then broken them all. One lesson he has learned growing up: you can keep your promises and find you’re still breaking them.

Another thing he has learned: sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones, but you still have to choose. How you live when you do that is by constructing a better self in its aftermath. By making it mean something.

Even a Time Lord forgets in a thousand years (or a thousand days, or one, sometimes in a moment simply by turning away), loses strands of lived reality to the torsion of his personal timeline, especially one as turbulent as his. The Doctor has spent great chunks of that life telling himself the story of his own existence, terrified he’ll forget. He has an entire culture to hold in his head, his memory like the cipher that makes possible their continued existence. He copies the text over and over, hoping to avoid transcription errors.

He’s borrowed, too, he knows, to fill in the losses. He’s made reconstructions. The lessons, for instance, he has mostly learned from his human friends. He’s looked to them to help him love, and to help him choose, and to help him remember. They’re very good at memory, because they remember so little. They can’t go back, and yet they rewrite the most, and somehow they construct a reality out of these fragments selected carefully out of their modest jumble. They know how to make hope where there is only despair. To make life from death. Meaning out of impossibility.

Better make sure it means the right thing.

The Doctor owes Clara. He owes Danny Pink. He owes every human who has ever flung one of those fairytale, gadfly lives at the conflagration in the name of something better, more meaningful, more loving than death’s arbitrary vacancies.

Anything that he does today will be a betrayal. Three souls wait, balanced on the fulcrum of his decision. One will lose, and two are too many to betray, but one will not kill.

What is it Clara said of Danny? _He’s hurting because I hurt him and he wants it to stop._

That’s as good a fairy tale as any to invent for himself.

He’s the Doctor, and that has to count for something. Not good or bad, no, but willing to step up to his duty of care.

Never cruel and never cowardly...it’s not just a promise; it’s a way of believing in himself.

No more narrative to construct now out of pieces of unreliable time and fragments of self. Faulty memory is pernicious in a Time Lord because a Time Lord remembers in both directions--and fact is recorded on a rewritable medium. What the Doctor has chosen to remember made him the Doctor, but being the Doctor has shaped the curation of his memories. The formation of his truth is a matter of retelling. Memory is an act, not an object.

“What will you tell the APC net?”

Ushas always asked the most important, most inconvenient questions.

“We’ll make something up.”

“Yes, you will. But you have to have a better plan than that. The Matrix will see right through you as soon as it compares your stories.”

“You know I’m not a good liar...but we have to tell it something.”

“There’s nothing to tell. We went into the wild. There was an accident. We did what we had to to survive.”

“But that’s--”

“That is the truth in our hearts, the truth that matters. One thing happened because of another. How events actually transpired--who was action and who reaction--is irrelevant. What we remember now, how we interpret our experience for the Matrix, is fact.”

Ushas looked unhappy. “That isn’t how fact works.”

“Empirically, perhaps not. But in this, the psychological truth is more significant. Someone died, futures went wrong, yes, but what does this death mean for who we will be, how we write our timelines? And who I choose to become will in turn determine what I remember.”

“Koschei…”

“ _It could just as easily have happened the other way_!”

But which way was that? Which way was the other way? The Matrix couldn’t remember what they never told it. And as bones disintegrated under ash and dirt, truth dissipated into groundwater like blood.

That truth mattered.

All his life, the Doctor has run with the shadow of his friend still stitched tightly to his bare soles. All their lives, since they were little, they have told their story together, since they were small, frightened, difficult, dreaming boys, shaping themselves out of the displaced air that rises over heat.

And for almost as long, this third playmate has haunted them, a third lover, always the hollow third, an absence of being. She’s here now.

He’s failed one friend--by putting off self-reflection in favour of complacency; by thinking there would always be tomorrow, another lifetime, another chance; by allowing all those years of days to creep by, days in which who you are is built one uneventful moment after the other and in repetition just as much as it is built on the red-letter episodes, on the end of the world and the cliffhanger and the decisions that determine the fates of whole species and whole idiotic, thrilling individuals; by letting memory get away from them both.

Once, when they were children, Koschei showed him how to pick memento mori flowers in his father’s garden. They pinched the blossom at its tender calyx and pulled the style from its housing like a tiny data rod, sipped the drop of nectar and discarded the freckled petals to litter the mosaic walkway. But out on the wild strath, uncultivated, the vines grew thorned and tangled, choking the natural path and killing the things that tried to grow alongside them.

There are days, drifting alone in an old man’s reverie, or rushing towards something exciting in a dead run, somebody following behind him, their hand in his, there are days when he forgets they’re not still children, believing that the promise of a future together is stronger than the weight of the past’s drowning waters.

But the grass underfoot is green. The air is thick and warm. The sky is pale with the light of a younger primary. They are not children, this is not home, this air, it has been said, is not his air. Even gravity drags differently here, grave though bones lie the same.

Half-buried, exhumed.

Death’s not a death to Time Lords unless you burn the flesh and bury the bones, delete the archive and expunge the record. Long ago, their species rewrote the terms of survival. Death’s like a debt-collector, waiting patiently, waiting doggedly, to be paid; but also chained to them like an obligation, a starving, unfed ghoul. Small wonder the last two of them still to walk the universe would be two who could never look her in the eye.

Their dead can’t seem to stay dead. But their lives have been a failure too. A fault of the hearts. A promise never fulfilled.

When did that happen, and how long has it been since the failure became irreparable? When did the Doctor let the dark win so mercilessly against his friend? He _will not_ fail another, this child for whom it isn’t yet too late. Even at the cost of his soul (no one can save it now, though he’ll let them pretend), and his struggling hearts, which never seem to stop sinking with this sorrow.

It’s time he took responsibility.

Missy’s eyes in this world’s light are hyperrealistically alive, and distressingly compassionate as she waits for him to finish lying to himself. He’s not a killer. He makes people better. His name is a promise.

“Say something nice.” And it is such a small request, and one of such magnitude. 

He shrugs with the lost helplessness of a man cornered. They’re out of strategems. He’s out of words. No more getting away with it and no more story.

“Please?”

It’s like he’s watching her drown, the river so clear he can see her staring up at him as she struggles not to suck in the cold, killing water. He remembers what it’s like to sink into those depths knowing that he would inevitably lose the fight for control over his own body, and die. He remembers being desperate to save his friend, and how that desperation pushed him past what he thought he could do, with a rock and the strength of his own arm.

They saved each others’ lives, once, but they were young, and they forgot to save one another’s souls.

Truth is, it was never because they were young. They were old by the time the Master refused to acknowledge he could be saved at all, refused to be dragged into air. And old another time the Doctor sat with him and held him and let him cry (but the Master never cried) on his way to an execution, a terrified, angry, half-crazed, unmanageable political prisoner; that foolishness that saved nobody. And he wasn’t young watching the Master burn, and seeing him hurt and in pain, and wondering if he’d been responsible, and losing him to years of stubborn refusal in the face of death.

He remembers being young, remembers running--they were always together in those wilder days--across the wild strath and the red grass beside the forest burning with searing light. He remembers dreaming, inventing their future with words and truths, beneath a tree that was two trees entwined together, the sky orange through its branches.

He remembers falling and thinking they have fallen before.

Once, a very long time ago, Death--which was hollowness, which was lies, which was the absence of truth--came to dance with him and his friend, to steal them from each other, and from that day the Doctor pieced together a story that wasn’t so much to save his own soul but _was_ his soul, to delay the claim for as long as he could, pretend that he was free. Once, there was the pyre, and the crime never written to memory, and the water’s moment’s chill as breathless as running into walls...but he drew back, as boys do from a stream on a mountain in winter.

Now, he has to write it again. One more sentence. Two last words, the hardest ones (two words never said). A few lives in one act, the end. A promise, a release. When he looks up at her at last, it is as though for the first time in a long, long time.

_“You win.”_

_“I know.”_

~

_And they rolled about, fighting as they had done for years, stopping the clocks for a minute longer._

_But there was a change somewhere. He and Pat were moving on. Glaciers would soon come grinding them apart, memories would be forgotten or adapted or faked._

_Yet, all his life--regret._

_Jane Gardam_ , Old Filth


End file.
